NOAA Confirms El Niño Has Crossed Into 'Super' Territory as US Logs Hottest Summer on Record

Since NOAA first declared El Niño's arrival in June, the pattern has strengthened fast enough that forecasters are now calling it a super El Niño. NOAA data released September 14 show the weekly Niño 3.4 Relative Oceanic Niño Index, or RONI, hit 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6°F) above average, according to CNN. That's the official cutoff for "very strong," the highest category NOAA tracks, and the informal trigger for the "super" label.

CNN reports this is the strongest El Niño on record for this point on the calendar, and NOAA's latest forecast, issued last week, puts the odds at 75 percent that it ends up the strongest event since record-keeping began in 1950. The Washington Post's tracking of forecast models shows central Pacific ocean temperatures projected to peak around 4.1°C (7.4°F) above average in December, roughly a full degree hotter than the previous record-holder, the 2015-16 El Niño.

Al Jazeera, citing NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, reports this event began developing in June 2026 and is expected to peak by early 2027, persisting through the March-to-May window next year. That timeline matters because El Niño's fingerprints show up in weather patterns for months after it peaks, not just while sea surface temperatures are climbing.

The super El Niño is compounding a US summer that NOAA has already confirmed as the hottest on record. The June-through-August average for the lower 48 states hit 74.4°F, beating the previous record set in 1936 and matched in 2021 by 0.4°F, according to NOAA figures reported by AFP. August alone was the warmest since 1895.

Karin Gleason, chief of the monitoring section at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, told AFP the 2026 summer edged out the Dust Bowl summer of 1936 "by a hair, it's like a photo finish." She noted a key difference: 1936's record came from scorching daytime highs during a historic drought, while 2026's record was driven by unusually warm overnight lows, which she attributed to a warmer atmosphere holding more moisture.

Drought covered nearly 60 percent of the contiguous US as of September 1, and Lake Mead, the country's largest reservoir, dropped to its lowest level on record, according to NOAA data cited by AFP. Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, told AFP the trend is "occurring exactly as forecast by scientists literally decades ago," adding that the real question isn't whether records keep falling but whether anyone acts on it.

El Niño itself is not new and not caused by fossil fuels. It's a naturally recurring ocean-atmosphere pattern that the World Meteorological Organization says has shown up every two to seven years for as long as records exist, with previous extreme events in 1877-78, 1888-89, 1972-73, 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16, according to CNN. That's a legitimate point skeptics raise: strong El Niños happened long before industrial-era warming, and the ocean cycle deserves credit or blame on its own terms.

Where NOAA's scientists and outside researchers like Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth part ways with that framing is on the baseline. Hausfather told AFP that this El Niño is developing on top of a planet that has already warmed significantly since the 1982-83 and 1997-98 events, which is why NOAA's own forecasts show it potentially exceeding every prior super El Niño by a wide margin. Whether that combination produces historically unprecedented damage or simply a stronger version of a familiar pattern is something only the coming months will settle.

Al Jazeera's regional breakdown, based on NOAA and World Meteorological Organization data, shows the pattern splitting the globe into wetter and drier halves. East Africa is bracing for heavier rain between October and December, with the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre in Kenya putting the odds of wetter conditions in southern Ethiopia, Somalia and northeastern Kenya at 90 percent, raising flood risk in a region that gets up to 70 percent of its annual rainfall in that window.

Meanwhile, India's summer monsoon has come in 15 percent below average between June 1 and September 9, according to the India Meteorological Department, and Indonesia is facing a drier season with elevated wildfire risk, Al Jazeera reports.

Off the California coast, the warming water has already produced unusual sightings. A 14-to-16-foot whale shark spotted alone off Malibu on September 9 and what pilot Carl Sbarounis described to KTLA as hundreds or thousands of giant rays migrating between San Diego and Catalina. NOAA data show Southern California coastal waters running 3 to 5 degrees above average. Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers caution that a single aerial sighting can't establish why the shark moved north, only that the pattern is consistent with past marine heatwaves that pulled subtropical species into California waters.

NOAA's Climate Prediction Center will issue its next full monthly update in October, which will show whether the three-month rolling average, the agency's official strength benchmark, is catching up to the record pace the weekly readings are already showing.